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App (or possibly app user) failure

By Whitney Sager

Editor

Spring is finally here! Or so it seemed Sunday when highs reached the 50s thanks to sunny skies and warmer air.

Of course, being the outdoors lover that I am, I took advantage of Sunday’s nice weather and went running outside. I can’t even begin to explain how good it felt to once again breathe in fresh air as I listen to my shoes hit the pavement.

Prior to heading out, I decided to try an app I had downloaded on my phone. I’ve been anxiously waiting to try it out since it can track how far I’ve run, and I can even set workout goals based on distance, time or the amount of calories I want to burn. When I opened the app, it told me I needed to move around to calibrate the settings. So I began to walk in circles inside my apartment, thinking that will do the trick. After the calibrator had been pulsing for several minutes, I figured it knows I’m just walking around in circles and I need to expand my area of “moving around.”

So I laced up my running shoes and headed outside. As I was doing my pre-run walk to get loosened up, I again let the calibrator do its thing. As I’m walking, the calibrator is still pulsing. “Hmm…,” I thought, “maybe I have to complete a workout before it can finish its calibration.”

Not wanting to wait any longer, I proceeded with my run. Every once in a while I would look down at my phone to see what the calibrator was up to. Still pulsing. Ran a little further. Still pulsing. As I reached the end of my run, it was still pulsing. Really?!?

The only option I had, other than letting it continue to pulse, was to hit “cancel.” Needless to say, I was disappointed I couldn’t get this app to work correctly. I was so excited at the thought of being able to track the length of my runs via my phone, rather than having to drive the route I took later on to determine the length. This wouldn’t be an issue if I would take the same path each time I run, but who wants to look at the same scenery all the time?

Ah well. Guess it’s time to find a different app that will hopefully work better than this one. So to all you fellow runners out there, I’d love to hear what apps you use to track your workouts - preferably ones that work correctly, or perhaps I should say, are user-friendly.